Tybout: Conservative, liberal movie lists not reliable

Last Monday, my roommates and I discovered a different kind of movie list: the National… Last Monday, my roommates and I discovered a different kind of movie list: the National Review’s Best Conservative Movies of the last 25 years. And no, “Red Dawn” isn’t No. 1.

I’m, by no means, a political conservative, but a lot of these movies are also my favorites. For instance, imagine my shock when I discovered that one of my favorite films of all time, “The Lives of Others” (2006) — a complicated drama set in the paranoid gloom of East Germany — took the top spot.

What did “The Lives of Others” do to earn such a title? What point-by-point criteria of conservative American ideology did it satisfy to reach the top? The answer, it turns out, is none. It won because William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the magazine, really liked it.

“This is the best movie I ever saw,” Buckley said after seeing the film. “I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passers-by in to watch the story unfold.”

Okay, I’ll give them this: The movie does make life in a socialist state look less than heavenly — and, I imagine, it was. But of the things I remember most, the characters and the story are first — the socialist state was merely a backdrop for the drama to unfold. Good movie? Yes. But a conservative movie? Not really.

Other movies on the list are equally baffling. “Groundhog Day?” “Ghostbusters?” Many of these picks are based on a single point — in the former, Bill Murray finding morals, and in the latter, the government-run Environmental Protection Agency being the villain (in addition to the ghosts, of course).

Not that Top 25 Liberal Movies lists fare any better. In response to the National Review, the Daily Kos crafted its own countdown, this one for granola-munching, Volvo-driving communists.Its top two movies — “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” — are documentaries made by famous liberals, and the next few are as scattershot as the conservative’s. One movie — Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” (1985) — even appears on both lists.

This can mean only one of two things: Either “Brazil” is the secret unifier that can rally both liberals and conservatives to a call of shared morals and national harmony, or these lists are arbitrary and stupid. As good as “Brazil” is, I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The National Review lacks clear criteria for evaluating movies, and the Daily Kos doesn’t even provide criteria because its list is based on polls. But even in the National Review’s more obvious picks — “300” and “Braveheart” — its arguments are unconvincing spins, as if the conservative message were the objective of the movie, rather than an unintended side lesson for already biased minds.

All of these movies are enjoyable, and despite what certain slanted publications would have you believe, liberals and conservatives are not inherently different from one another, at least as far as entertainment preferences go. They can all enjoy the same movies because they’re all part of the same human experience that these films seek to emulate.

Good movies transcend the political spectrum. They go beyond the thin, divisive rhetoric that keeps people entrenched in their own distorted vision of reality, and they do this by telling stories — humanity’s greatest artistic invention.

“Forrest Gump” (number four on the conservative list) isn’t good because Forrest — not exactly an intellectual giant — “is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s.” It’s good because it looks at the many faces of the world through a uniquely human, rather than political, lens. That’s what movies — good movies, at least — are all about.

So unless the subversive political undertones of “Ghostbusters” suddenly strike me, I’m going to keep watching it with an admirably impartial mind. I encourage all of you to do the same.